By Dr. Gyan Pathak As Election Commission of India (ECI) was busy in giving final shape to the Draft Revised Electoral Roll of Bihar to be published on August 1, an oral direction of the Supreme Court to ECI on July 28 to proceed with accepting Aadhaar and Electors...
By T N Ashok NEW YORK: US President Donald Trump is emerging as a parallel to the WTO which we could eponymously call the “American Trade Organisation” — ATO — with his Art of the Deal with Indonesia, Japan and now EU. ATO is a unique organization that Trump...
By R. Suryamurthy When China quietly shut off the tap on fertiliser exports to India earlier this year, it didn’t just disrupt supply lines or trigger a price surge. It exposed a far more troubling truth: India’s agricultural security is only as strong as the weakest link in its...
By Arun Srivastava Quite intriguing, notwithstanding agreeing to the submission of petitioners, especially of the Association of Democratic Reforms, the Supreme Court has refused to pass order restraining ECI from publishing the draft voter list implying the implementation of its plan to remove names of nearly 1 crore Dalits,...
By Sushil Kutty Union Home Minister Amit Shah spoke in the special debate on Operation Sindoor and Operation Mahadev and it was a clinical performance, concentrating as he did on explaining threadbare ‘Operation Sindoor’, which was primarily against ‘terrorism’ and Pakistan was a carrier of the disease. For Shah,...
By Subrata Majumder Concerns loomed large, when the basic reciprocal tariff on imports from Vietnam to USA was drastically cut by Trump administration on July 9, 2025 from 45 percent to 20 percent, leaving India in a major setback. This is lower than import tariff from India, which will...
By Tirthankar Mitra KOLKATA: Processions are commonplace in West Bengal with its capital Kolkata being once dubbed “a city of processions” by a prime minister. But the “bhasa michil’ (language procession) taken out on Monday by Trinamool Congress supremo Mamata Banerjee leading a sizeable number of activists in the...
By Nantoo Banerjee The European Union seems to have arrogated itself with extrajudicial power to prevent outside nations from purchasing Russian oil. It has no locus standi to impose its will on countries which are not members of EU. Thus, the latest expansion of the EU sanctions targeting Russian...
By Dr. Gyan Pathak The first week of the Monsoon Session of the Parliament of India closed with a note of hope, which turned into frustration with the beginning of the second week on July 28. Protests and adjournments crippled both the Houses of the Parliament of India –...
By Kalyani Shankar The political circles were aghast when Vice President Jagdeep Dhankhar abruptly resigned in the current monsoon session. His term was to end in 2027. He was the Prime Minister’s direct choice. Dhankhar had previously stated, ‘I will retire at the right time, in August 2027, subject...
By Sushil Kutty “When Ravana crossed… and when Pakistan crossed”, both times red lines drawn by “India” were breached. Parliamentary Affairs minister Kiren Rijiju posted this on ‘X’, invoking Ramayana and talking about the “special debate” on ‘Operation Sindoor’ in the Lok Sabha. “When Pakistan crossed the red lines...
By Satyaki Chakraborty Sumit Chakravartty, who led the Mainstream weekly for more than four decades consistently carrying the fight against the divisive forces in the country upholding the cause of secular values and equity, passed away late Saturday evening, July 26, in Kolkata. He was 81. He is survived...
By Rabindra Nath Sinha KOLKATA: Manipur Pradesh Congress Committee has recently posed to state Governor Ajay Bhalla certain constitutionally significant issues regarding the status of the 60 member-Manipur Legislative Assembly. If stretched a point, the issues raised by Manipur Congress president K Meghachandra Singh, MLA, in his letter to...
By Tirthankar Mitra KOLKATA: Sholay, the movie which is arguably one of the most significant milestones of Indian cinema has turned 50. Released at a time when colour television sets were not part of our lives and mobile phones and laptops were not even in our wildest dreams, Sholay...
By Ben Chacko LONDON: Four hundred thousand and counting. Sign-ups to be part of founding the new party initiated by Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana in Britain already surpass the membership of any existing political party in Britain. While the appetite for a left alternative to Labour has long...
By Dr. Gyan Pathak It is ridiculous. Union Government of India is still hiding behind a questionable extrapolation on employment based on Reserve Bank of India’s KLEMS (Capital, Labour, Energy, Materials, and services) database, and informed the Lok Sabha on July 24 that India added 17 crore jobs between...
By Arun Srivastava By adding 70 lakh fake voters, the then CEC Rajeev Kumar had helped Narendra Modi’s NDA to grab two-third seats out of 288 in the assembly elections held in Maharashtra in 2024 end and now his successor, current CEC Gyanesh Kumar is working on the plan...
By K Raveendran As expected, the United States Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) has absolved Boeing of any mechanical fault in the Air India 787 jetliner crash at Ahmedabad that killed 260 people, in a move that seems both premature and all too familiar. The FAA’s basis for clearing Boeing...